Your Daily Phil: Backing Israeli farmers on the front lines
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In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we reflect on the Israeli government’s mixed messages in the face of Israeli extremist violence in the West Bank, and speak with ReGrowIsrael’s executive director, Danielle Abraham, about her organization’s support for Israeli farmers on the country’s war-torn borders in the wake of the Oct. 7 terror attacks and resulting conflicts. We feature an opinion piece by The Blue Card‘s Masha Pearl, who urges funders to fold direct survivor aid into Holocaust remembrance budgets, and one by LippmanKanfer Family Philanthropies’ Joe Kanfer and Mamie Kanfer Stewart, who call on funders backing AI to invest in learning before building products. Also in this issue: Alyssa Sperber Gold, Lindsey Spindle and Rivkah Chitrik.
Today’s Your Daily Phil was curated by eJP Managing Editor Judah Ari Gross and Israel Editor Justin Hayet. Have a tip? Email us here.
What We’re Watching
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and City Councilmember Nithya Raman will appear tonight at a mayoral candidate forum hosted by the Jewish Federation Los Angeles.
In New York, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was wrongly imprisoned in Russia for 16 months, will sit in conversation with David Remnick at the Streicker Center to discuss his new book, This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story, out today.
What You Should Know
A QUICK WORD FROM eJP’S JUDAH ARI GROSS
Back-to-back incidents related to extremist Israeli violence against Palestinians in the West Bank are highlighting the government’s failures to prevent such attacks and its inconsistent approach to the issue.
Overnight, dozens of radical settlers attacked the Palestinian village of Jalud, setting fire to homes and cars, blocking roadways and assaulting Israeli troops who had been escorting a Palestinian family home after they had fled following regular harassment and attacks by neighboring settlers. The mob attack was swiftly condemned by Israeli political leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and local settlement officials.
The overnight assault came shortly after Haaretz reported that Israel’s Interior Ministry was blocking the immigration applications for two people — a British Jewish man and an American Jewish woman — because of their past activism to prevent Israeli extremist violence against Palestinians. On the one hand, the Israeli government is criticizing Israeli extremist violence in the West Bank; on the other, it is barring citizenship from foreign-born Jews lawfully working to prevent it.
Read the rest of ‘What You Should Know’
News
FARM AID
A matter of national security: Danielle Abraham on 3 years aiding Israel’s war-torn border farms
Danielle Abraham, CEO and founder of ReGrow Israel, has been on the front lines of Israel’s agricultural revival since the Oct. 7 terror attacks, partnering with farmers in Israel’s North and South to replace destroyed equipment, rebuild water infrastructure and get farms producing again for the rest of the country. In a conversation with eJewishPhilanthropy’s Justin Hayet, Abraham discusses what funders need to understand about how Israel’s agricultural system, which she described as a matter of national security.
JH: You call agriculture a national security asset. How so?
DA: We don’t have enough land to feed ourselves even if we wanted to turn every piece of land into growing wheat. So on the national security front, national food security is critical element No. 1.
The second is physical, pure military security. If we don’t have communities on our borders, the front line moves back, quite literally. During the war, many, many times, the farmers were the front line. In the North, it was our farmers and then, behind the farmers, some IDF positions.
Opinion
NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION
Every Holocaust remembrance budget should help a living survivor
In an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy, Masha Pearl, executive director of The Blue Card, urges Jewish funders to build direct aid for living survivors into every major Holocaust remembrance initiative, arguing that projects preserving survivors’ stories should also help cover the rent, medical and caregiving costs of the roughly 31,000 still alive in the U.S.
“There will come a time when Holocaust philanthropy is about memory alone because no living witnesses remain. We are not there yet.”
READER RESPONDS
If we’re going to fund AI, let’s fund it right
In an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy, Lippman Kanfer Family Philanthropies’ Joe Kanfer and Mamie Kanfer Stewart respond to a recent eJP article about how Jewish funders should engage with artificial intelligence, calling on them to thoughtfully bankroll experimentation and research.
“Our tradition does not ask us to embrace every new technology or to reject it simply because it is new. It asks us to wrestle with change, establish thoughtful boundaries, and consider how our choices align with our values and our responsibilities. AI should be no different.”
Worthy Reads
Made in America: In Haaretz, Uriel Schachter explores how American immigrants to Israel — such as former Ambassador Ron Dermer, Michael Eisenberg, Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Saul Singer — have become a major force in their adopted country. “A closer look at their role over recent decades, particularly in recent years, reveals their enormous influence on the economy, high-tech, politics and the country’s centers of power.”
Keene Connections: In The Forward, journalist Louis Keene, whose father converted to Judaism, writes about finally getting to play Jewish geography after discovering two other Jewish Keenes. “[On] NCSY Shabbatons or at Hillel dinners, when everyone else knew someone who knew someone, I didn’t. Like the converts of the biblical desert, I felt I’d always be pitching my tent on the fringes. Everything changed one day earlier this year when, doomscrolling on X, I came across a post from a user with my last name. … We soon pieced together that we were both descended from Mayflower folks — believe it or not, the same one.”
Exit Plan: In The Hill, Mia Emmunah Toubian and Jason Bryan Silverstein call on Congress to reauthorize the Lautenberg Amendment to assist Jews in Iran in their efforts to leave the Islamic Republic. “The administration should refund and reopen the processing centers that support it. Fourteen thousand stranded people, and their families in America, are waiting to see whether Trump’s promises about fighting antisemitism abroad mean anything when Jews facing persecution actually need a way out.”
Major Gifts
The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Supporting Foundation donated $2 million to support a Western Reserve Historical Society project to digitize the Cleveland Jewish Archives and produce a fresh account of the city’s Jewish past…
Qualcomm Co-founder Irwin Jacobs pledged $50 million to Father Joe’s Villages for a San Diego campus with more than 500 apartments and on-site care for homeless seniors…
The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation is allocating $816,000 across Montana nonprofits through its AMB West Community Fund, targeting child care, housing and food access in Park and Gallatin counties as well as Native communities…
Transitions
Alyssa Sperber Gold was named executive vice president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America…
The Union for Reform Judaism appointed Rabbi Michael Namath for the newly created post of assistant vice president of movement building…
Cobi Weissbach joined the Jewish Federation of Princeton Mercer Bucks (N.J., Pa.) as its new CEO…
Jon Kelsen is leaving his role at Drisha Institute For Jewish Education as its chief education officer…
Leonid Leo Krupnik was hired by Jewish National Fund-USA as its new director of Northern California…
Brooke Goldberg started a new role at International March of the Living as director of strategic operations…
Martín Volinsky joined the Alpha Epsilon Pi Foundation as its director of development for the Southeast region…
Word on the Street
Tel Aviv University‘s Moshe Dayan Center is teaming up with the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy on a joint research center probing extremism and antisemitism across the Middle East and Muslim world, offering doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships…
Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport told Israel’s Kan 11 that he views his public activism — from LGBTQ causes to his purchase of Israel’s Reshet 13 TV — as his personal “teaspoon”of responsibility…
The board of Goldman Sachs is mulling a plan that would see CEO David Solomon step down as soon as late 2027 and John Waldron, the bank’s COO and president, take over the role…
French far-right leader Jordan Bardella, a close ally of Israel’s current government, is suing investigative site Mediapart for defamation over its report that he sent antisemitic private messages between 2013 and 2015, including allegedly writing that Jews own “all the banks” …
The Orange County Business Journal profiles Samueli Family Philanthropies President Lindsey Spindle, who has grown the foundation’s annual grantmaking from $18.8 million in 2022 to a projected $185 million this year, with roughly 40% earmarked for groups fighting antisemitism in the U.S. and Israel…
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt is hiring the group’s first chief revenue officer to push yearly donations toward $150 million after three consecutive years topping $100 million…
Tourist arrivals in Israel plunged 78% in the first half of 2026 from the same period in 2023, yet foreign credit card spending slipped just 7.8% to NIS 9.7 billion ($3.16 billion), a gap that Shva, which operates Israel’s national card-payment network, partly credits to foreign Jewish organizations making donations in Israel online…
British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband delivered the keynote speaker at a pro-Palestinian reception at a Labour Party conference in Liverpool, while he and the rest of Prime Minister Andy Burnham‘s Cabinet will skip Labour Friends of Israel‘s event; the moves come amid a widening rift over Britain’s new sanctions on West Bank settlements…
Rivkah Chitrik, who helped build Jewish schools in Brazil as one of the first emissaries the Lubavitcher Rebbe sent abroad after taking the helm of Chabad, died Monday at 96…
Pic of the Day
Israeli President Isaac Herzog plays a game with Israeli children this morning in the sukkah of the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, which is opened to the public each year.
Birthdays
Clara Mamet, film and television actor best known for her role in the ABC comedy “The Neighbors,” turns 32
Hillel “Harry” Furstenberg, mathematician and professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, turns 91
John Edward Sexton, president of New York University from 2002 to 2015, he is the author of Baseball as a Road to God, turns 84
Avital Inbar, Israeli author, translator, journalist and restaurant critic, turns 82
Leon Biederman, retired CEO of Southern California-based LinQuest Corporation, he is a board member at Sinai Temple
Ya’akov Dov “Ketzele” Katz, former member of the Knesset, he serves as the executive director of Beit El Yeshiva and as chairman of Arutz Sheva, turns 75
Harold Gernsbacher, past treasurer of the Board of Trustees of the Jewish Federations of North America
Roger Bart, Tony Award-winning actor and singer, turns 64
David Hirsh, professor of sociology at the University of London and the academic director and CEO of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, turns 59
Yitzhak Yedid, composer and pianist, he is the winner of the 2020 Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music, turns 55
Matthew Stephen Meyer, governor of Delaware, turns 55
Brian Shankman, CEO of 2048 Ventures, following 21 years in senior positions at AIPAC
Aviva Rosenthal, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s office of global affairs
Rebecca Rhynhart, city controller of Philadelphia from 2018 to 2022, turns 52
Adriene Mishler, YouTube-based yoga instructor, turns 42
Aron Chilewich, program manager at New York State Homes & Community Renewal
Shawn Pasternak, research director at D.C.-based S-3 Group
BIRTHDAY WEEK: Elana Frank, CEO and founder of the Jewish Fertility Foundation, celebrated her birthday yesterday.
